Nevada Regents Approve Plan to Arm Professors

Next time, if an unhinged student chooses a campus in Las Vegas or Reno instead of Blacksburg, Va., Stavros Anthony wants Nevada’s colleges and universities to be prepared. After April’s shootings at Virginia Tech, the Las Vegas police captain and member of the Nevada Board of Regents proposed that the Nevada System of Higher Education protect itself against a similar attack, in part, by enabling faculty and staff members to become reserve police officers.

The Nevada System of Higher Education’s Board of Regents has endorsed a plan that would encourage faculty and staff members to go about their business armed with guns that could be used to thwart an attack like the one that took 32 lives at Virginia Tech in April. According to the Web site of KLAS, a local television station in Las Vegas, the regents approved a plan under which the system would pay a $3,000 fee for each faculty or staff member who wanted to take a 21-week training course in how to use firearms. The plan got mixed reviews from the students KLAS interviewed. —Andrew Mytelka